


kingmaker, oathbreaker

by AlexSeanchai



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir is Like a Disney Princess, Aftermath of Violence, Be Careful What You Wish For, Bee Sabine Cheng, Cognitive Dissonance, Dissociation, Dragon Ladybug Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Dragonbug, Emilie Agreste Lives, Empathy, F/M, Family Issues, Family Secrets, Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth Wins, Guardian Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Happy Ending, Marriage Proposal, Minor Violence, Miraculous Side Effects, Ox Tom Dupain, Post-Reveal Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:41:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22690417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexSeanchai/pseuds/AlexSeanchai
Summary: A man's home is his castle, and his wife is his queen. What castle would be complete without its châtelaine? Or without its prince, locked in a tower if he will not stay safely within the castle's defenses of his own will?The purpose of becoming Hawkmoth, swore Gabriel Agreste, was to ensure that all his family live.
Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Emilie Agreste & Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir & Sabine Cheng & Tom Dupain, Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug, Emilie Agreste/Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Sabine Cheng & Marinette Dupain-Cheng | Ladybug & Tom Dupain
Comments: 17
Kudos: 262
Collections: THEME:  Parents-in-Law





	kingmaker, oathbreaker

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to silveradept for betaing!

Émilie sits slowly up, dazed; magic flares over the man slumped at her bedside—her _husband_ , and that's unmistakably her son, though he's never been allowed in their bedroom before, as she's never yet been confident enough in his trustworthiness to keep such secrets as Émilie's diaries contain: Adrien's grown so _tall_ , so strong, so—fearful and furious?

Adrien tears the silver-tone stud earrings from Gabriel's ears and ignores the bleeding and Gabriel's hiss of pain, yanks the matching ring from Gabriel's right ring finger, rips first the tie then the pin underneath it from Gabriel's throat—the _Butterfly Miraculous_! Émilie realizes with horror, watching it change shape in her son's grasp.

"Where's the Peacock?" Adrien snarls to Gabriel, vicious and icy and very definitely using the proper noun whose significance he shouldn't know.

"What are you _doing_?" demands Émilie. "Adrien, that brooch is priceless, it's _dangerous_ , you shouldn't even _touch_ it while angry—what is _wrong_ with you?"

Adrien stares at her for three cold seconds, pocketing the jewelry, scrolling frantically through his phone.

"This had _better_ be important," snaps the girl on the other end of the line. "Like, lives literally on the line, _important_."

"Princess?" asks Adrien, and sags for half a second with obvious profound relief when she replies "Oh thank all the Gods!"

Émilie recognizes the voices of every one of Adrien's friends. She has always made a point of knowing who her son cares about.

Who is _this_?

"You're on speaker," Adrien says with deliberate cheer, moving to lean on Émilie's bedside table, knocking the current diary to the floor. "Did you know Émilie Agreste says this cute little butterfly pin I took off her husband's person is _dangerous_? Shouldn't even touch it when angry, she says." Amused as he's plainly trying to sound, it is blazingly obvious that Adrien is _very angry_. It's not his tone of voice, nor his stance, though those don't contradict this conclusion: it's that Émilie wields the Peacock Miraculous—where _is_ Duusu?—and therefore she just _knows_. "She wants to know what's _wrong with me_."

"…mon poulet, you just injured your father." Émilie needs to—call Nathalie? Call Nathalie. "You are stealing from us, you are threatening us, and you do not seem to think any of this is a bad thing." She's laying out the facts as gently as she can; Adrien hiding his emotions behind a wall of ice and fury like this is new and concerning and she doesn't know what to do. "It's an important question."

Adrien rolls his eyes. "You're hearing this, right?"

"Did she just call you _chicken_?" The girl, whose name cannot possibly be _princesse_ , substitutes the English word for Émilie's well-used endearment. "Adrien, has she _met_ you ever?"

"Nope!" Adrien pauses. "Or anyway she hasn't noticed I'm not twelve."

Since Gabriel is incapacitated, Émilie is not much better, the only thing in sight to call Nathalie _with_ is the phone in Adrien's hand, and her son is not the sweet boy she remembers but a furious young man—

The girl snorts. "Injured, not dead," she muses. "What, did you tear his ears off?"

"See, this is why I don't want to be you much," Adrien tells the girl, laughing with what Émilie can feel is genuine love and adoration for the girl he's poking gentle fun at. "Because then _you_ have to be _me_ , and you're _bloodthirsty_."

"Scared, Potter?"

"That's a multiple choice question," Adrien says. "A, you wish, B, _as_ you wish, C, hey, _I'm_ the rich dumb blond here, stop stealing my lines, and D, yes." There is a thread of sincerity in all four answers that worries Émilie. "Terrified."

"Lifeline time!" says the girl, in a tone that makes Gabriel flinch. (Émilie suspects her own heart should be racing, and only isn't because her everything is so sluggish.) "I am going to phone a friend! Anyway, wait till you meet my—"

Thump thump thump thump thud.

Adrien's fear spikes. "Princess?"

"Did I mention I am maladroit?" demands the girl, audibly annoyed. "Did I mention I am _madly clumsy_?"

"She fell down the stairs," says a man's warm voice. "Bruises at worst."

Adrien calms. Relaxes. Sparks with brief amusement he doesn't voice. "Thank you, sir." He returns his attention to Gabriel, smile fading. "Where is the Peacock?"

"I would like to know that myself," Émilie tells Gabriel.

Her husband looks up at her with eyes he's struggling to keep open; the depth of his feeling for her rings in his words: "I swore to find a way to bring you back," Gabriel tells Émilie. "To put our family back together." Pain and regret. "Nathalie—has helped, and has suffered for it."

"You know," remarks Adrien bitterly to the girl on the phone, "suddenly a lot makes sense. Why Nathalie came down with something with the same symptoms as what killed Maman, why no one wanted me curious about what was wrong or how to help—even why he flipped out so badly when I tried telling him not to hold off asking to marry her on _my_ account. I bet that was _not_ the conversation he thought he was starting that day."

Émilie glances between Adrien and Gabriel.

"…Cuddle pile on a rooftop later?" suggests the girl.

Peacock empathy doesn't include the power to know anything of the _thoughts_ associated with an emotion—that's a Butterfly trick—but that Adrien restrains himself from blurting out the first words entangled with the astonished, delighted love he feels for this girl? That he believes he will hurt her if he responds with his first impulse instead of with the "You're the best!" he actually exclaims? That he _cares_ whether he hurts her, as he does not about his (Émilie thought) beloved father?

That is written on his face in flickers of eyelashes and twitches of lips that might as well be plain French text.

Adrien returns his cool attention to Gabriel. "So where is the Peacock Miraculous?"

"You cannot take her from me," says Émilie.

The glance Adrien gives her conveys both intense curiosity and a distinct sense of _I refuse to care_.

"You _can't_ ," says Émilie. "Each Miraculous has a—a spirit attached, you might say."

" 'Phenomenal cosmic power, itty-bitty living space,' " says the girl. Her voice sounds different somehow?

A flicker of Adrien's indecision, exhaustion, then determination, and he breaks into song: " 'You in luck 'cause up your sleeves, you got a brand of magic never fails'—"

"That's creepy, please stop," says the girl.

He stops.

"So you know the Peacock spirit is my friend," says Émilie. "Please don't hurt her by taking her away from me. Please don't hurt _me_."

Adrien rolls his eyes, taking a string of beads from his pocket: motley, childish, with a gaudy green bead for the centerpiece, large and square: his thumb traces its four-leaf clover engraving. "Princess, you're hearing this, right?"

"To be fair," says the girl, "if I woke up somewhere with only you and a four-years-older Manon and I didn't know how I got there, and the first thing I saw Manon do was hurt you, I wouldn't be too happy with her either."

"I'd hope not," agrees Adrien, gaze intent now on Émilie. "But you also wouldn't assume Manon was in the wrong. Or that I was," which carries an overtone of reluctant admission. "And I've tried to kill you often enough you would _know_ you would be unable to trust me before finding out what you _don't know_."

Those words are simple French. The accompanying emotions are tangled knots that make even less sense in that order than the words do.

"Speaking of," the girl says cheerfully, "remember Copycat?" Adrien winces, but the pain the girl just inflicted is a familiar one to him. "Reaction meme, bad math, caption 'I don't know how, but you used the wrong formula and got the correct answer.' "

Adrien plainly does not know what to make of that any more than Émilie does.

"Gabriel," he says instead of replying. "The Peacock Miraculous. _Where_."

Émilie's husband opens his eyes. "Swore to repair our family," he whispers.

Adrien snarls something that sounds like swearing but may only be harshly spoken Mandarin. "Princess, he may _also_ need medical attention," he tells the girl.

"Yeah, one minute."

He nods and, with a burst of pain and annoyance, crosses the room to open the window. "Remind me," Adrien says, sour, "to tell Nino that _Star Wars_ marathon is postponed for the foreseeable future."

Wind blasts them: flapping the curtains and sheets and shirts, riffling the pages of Émilie's fallen diary—something brilliant white darts around them all—

Adrien grins with unrestrained joy at the black-masked, gold-horned, red-garbed girl who stands in Émilie's bedroom, holding her sword as a new fencer does as though to protect _Adrien_ from _Émilie and Gabriel_.

"He won't be surprised," says the girl, her tone joking and her heart blazing: fury, triumph, fiercely protective love. She flicks half a glance over her shoulder and up toward Adrien: "You know, I've never seen _How to Train Your Dragon_?"

Adrien laughs. "What, not _Maleficent_ or _Mulan_?"

"What do I need Disney princess movies for, Adrien? I've got you."

Surprise-delight-hope-hesitation-disappointment. None of this shows on Adrien's face, and only partly because he drops his gaze to the pocket with his ill-gotten gains. "Uh, I think your earrings are a bit of a health haz—" He catches the bottle the girl produces from quite possibly nowhere: _rubbing alcohol_ , the label says. "—aha." He spills some on his shirttail, ignoring it overflowing onto the floor, and uses that to clean Gabriel's blood off the stolen earrings.

When he moves toward the girl, intent (Émilie suspects) on securing the earrings to her ears, Gabriel's faint pained protest pushes her to rise. "You can't," she tells Adrien. "Those are _mine_."

The disbelief Adrien feels has little of surprise and none of protest: only frustration and pain.

"Carapace says they found Mayura," the girl tells Adrien, triumph waxing and fury waning. "Rena Rouge has Nathalie's confession on film, the EMTs have Nathalie—"

Émilie blinks. "What happened to Nathalie?"

"My," mutters Adrien. "I wonder. One of them should check the safe behind the gold portrait," he adds to the girl, who nods.

The bedroom door bursts open: a tiny yellow-masked woman, yellow qipao and black leggings wielding a yellow-and-black top like a weapon, and behind her a mountain of a deep-blue-masked, light-blue-horned man.

"Gabriel Agreste," says the girl, "alias Hawkmoth, used the combined power of the Ladybug and Black Cat Miraculouses to grant himself a wish." She glances at Gabriel with unconcealed contempt. "It looks like merely wielding _my_ earrings and _my partner's_ ring nearly killed him. I doubt, then, that he is who paid the _price_ of that wish." The girl looks Émilie over. "One life gained, one life lost. Sit down before you fall over."

Adrien frowns. "You said 'EMTs', though. Not 'medical examiner'."

The girl tilts her head.

"So Nathalie's still alive," Adrien says.

She nods.

"Well, _Émilie_ was definitely dead." Adrien eyes her. Émilie doesn't want to sit down: weak as she is, it may be hopeless—the woman in yellow is watching Gabriel, as if the hope she's feeling is that he will rise so that she may sting, and the man in blue is moving to stand beside Adrien at the girl in red's back, feeling parental concern and pride—but if a chance comes to find out what has gone wrong with her son, to take back what he is taking, she _must_ be ready. "So Nathalie's life wasn't the price."

The sound of several pairs of feet in the hallway. The room fills with emergency medical technicians—professional concern overriding hatred, fear, or derision in every one of them, but in some, only just—and police officers. Émilie doesn't want to let anyone treat her, to let anyone take her husband and son away—

"Adrien is not to blame for his family's crimes," says the girl in red in a ringing voice, to one of several taken-aback police officers. Adrien is leaning on the man in blue, now. "Please do not try to arrest him," the girl continues. "I would hate to have to fight you."

"…And you are, mademoiselle?" asks the officer in charge.

Green light flares over Adrien. "My partner," says this black-masked cat-eared stranger, moving forward to drape his arms over the shoulder of the girl in red and secure the earrings in his hand to her ears. Pink light flares over her, changing her garb to red and black in equal measure, gold dividing the sides and bounding the spots of each color in the field of the other. "I probably knew more than she thinks," he continues, "but I know I didn't know I knew it."

One of the EMTs not crowding Émilie and Gabriel turns her attention to the boy who isn't Adrien. "I was wondering how you were doing, Chat Noir," she says. "Let me check you over, and Ladybug, if you could go to my colleague—" A flash of worry from her. "Unless you think there's more danger?"

The girl—Ladybug?—shrugs. "There's another shoe up there," she answers. "We'll find it and deal with it when it drops, I guess."

"We're fine," Chat Noir adds. " _I've_ been much worse, anyway, _you_ should put the sword away so the nice medical techs don't think you're going to decapitate them." This prospect clearly does not worry him.

"Been worse, huh," says Ladybug, finally lowering her sword. "Do you mean 'Miraculer' or do you mean 'dead'?"

"Uh." Chat Noir looks suddenly shifty and feels embarrassed. "I meant 'Papa-Garou'." This embarrasses the man in blue.

"I find it fascinating," remarks the woman in yellow, "that the woman who is supposedly your mother, and who reportedly does not know anything about the last few years in Paris and who should therefore be surprised by the notion of the afterlife _having_ revolving doors, does not seem to object to the notion that you have been _through_ those revolving doors. Ladybug, medical care, please."

"Shut up, Mìfēng," mutters Ladybug, avoiding her eyes.

The man in blue sighs. "Sit down and let the nice medical techs have a look at you, son."

Chat Noir startles badly, bringing himself and Ladybug to the floor: it feels so much, so _painfully much_ like Adrien's shock and delight at any sign of Gabriel willing to peek out from behind his heart's shields to show more plainly how much he loves his son—

Ladybug rolls out from under Chat Noir and up to her knees next to him. "So your classmates assure me you are an actual Disney princess," she tells him, knocking his side with her elbow. Chat Noir rolls his eyes and grumbles. She continues, "I meanwhile am obviously the dashing, daring Flynn Rider."

"Still my line," mutters Chat Noir.

"He says, exactly as though I don't know he'll melt into a puddle if I scratch him behind the ears," Ladybug tells the man in blue. To Chat Noir, she says, "Disney princess movies do tend to end with a wedding."

Émilie can feel Chat Noir's brain bluescreen. She didn't feel the EMT putting on the blood pressure cuff or some sort of monitor on her finger, she is only now noticing that her husband is no longer in the room—but the amazed confusion Chat Noir feels, that's loud and clear.

"—um, if you want," Ladybug says, looking down and away. "A lot of our friends would be happy to be your family—I know I'm not…much…under—"

Chat Noir stops her with a finger to the lips. "Buginette? What changed?"

"I think I figured out what happened when you got akumatized," Ladybug says, to the confusion of everyone else in the room. "It wasn't that you knew my name, or that I fell in love with you—and kitty, I was…really determined to believe that was future tense, not, you know, your first day of school—no, I think what happened is we were dating and your father didn't like that. If he hadn't found out, I bet he would never have tried to akumatize you."

"…Is that all even French?" wonders the man in blue.

"Shut _up_ , Terribull," protests Ladybug.

Chat Noir starts laughing. "Will this make more sense if I go talk to the Easter Bunny?" Ladybug nods in reply, beginning to laugh herself, in a way that feels plainly like in two minutes she'll be crying.

Émilie gives up on understanding anything that has happened today.

—no, she cannot concede on _everything_. Not quite. "What happened?" Émilie asks, staring between—Miraculous wielders, all of them, they must be: one standing where her son was, three more on whose behalf her son acted. "What happened to my son?"

"Well," says Chat Noir, hiding his emotions again behind a wall of ice and fury, "sounds like your husband wished for his family all _alive_ again. I think I heard something about his swearing an oath to that effect. And the biggest hole in his family, maybe even the only one he knew about, was that _you_ , Émilie, were dead."

"I think he must have specified _all_ his family alive," says Ladybug. "Otherwise the price of wishing you back to life would have been the death of someone equally precious to him." Her heart blazes with fierce protective love. "Most likely Adrien."

Émilie flinches.

"But you're all alive," Chat Noir continues. "And probably going to stay that way. Which means the price of that wish was something else, wasn't it?"

"Gain a wife," says Ladybug. "Lose a son."

Chat Noir twists around to look up at Terribull and Mìfēng. "Can we go home now?"

Mìfēng and Terribull glance at each other, then at Chat Noir and Ladybug. "Hospital," says Mìfēng, and Terribull echoes her.

"Ladybug," asks the medical tech, "is it safe to move her?"

Émilie doesn't hear the answer, or doesn't know she hears it: the answer must be affirmative, because Émilie is lying on a stretcher being rolled from the room when a girl in foxlike orange and a hooded boy carrying a turtle-shell shield run past, the girl with camera snapping.

"Oh look, the paparazzi," she hears Chat Noir laughingly complain; "Come on, Adrien, she needs these photos for your wedding," protests the other boy; "I'm not eighteen for two months!" exclaims Ladybug; Chat Noir, startled, asks "Wait, you weren't joking?"

'Before finding out what you _don't know_ ', thinks Émilie. Well. She'll have to learn what Gabriel _did_ , won't she. And why. What Nathalie's part was. As much as she can of what Adrien knows and she doesn't.

It wouldn't do, if—whatever Émilie doesn't understand, whatever Émilie doesn't remember being party to—meant Adrien wouldn't want to invite his mother to his wedding.

**Author's Note:**

> [My comment policy](https://alexseanchai.tumblr.com/post/612627045048008704/as-a-fic-writer-i-need-every-reader-to-know): tl;dr happy comments make me happy. So do thinky comments, of course, but there exist jerks who think only thinky comments are worth anyone leaving.
> 
> Find me on [Dreamwidth](https://alexseanchai.dreamwidth.org/) and [Tumblr](https://alexseanchai.tumblr.com/).


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